


those cooler shades of love

by Sarah T (SarahT), SarahT



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 20:45:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19838197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarahT/pseuds/Sarah%20T, https://archiveofourown.org/users/SarahT/pseuds/SarahT
Summary: Aziraphale would very much appreciate it if they could stop meeting like this.





	those cooler shades of love

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the Spike for betaing and D. for a read.
> 
> For MK, who would have disapproved thoroughly.

The mood of the crowd that cold early afternoon near the Banqueting House was strange.They knew they were to witness something no one alive, not the oldest man there, had ever seen.Some were eager, hardened by years of war and revolution.Some were horrified at the very idea and praying for a last-minute reprieve.And in a city where most of the public entertainments had been shut down for several years, some just wanted a good show—the execution of a traitor being the one spectacle even the Roundheads would not deny the public.

The soldiers with pikes held them all at a distance from the scaffolding hung with black cloth on which the masked men with axes stood, not caring to risk what any of those moods might give rise to.It was a prudent gesture.But they had no idea of the real powers in the surging mass of onlookers before them.

“Do you really think they’ll do it?” the angel asked the demon, who for once wore strategically short-cut hair.

“Kill the Lord’s anointed?Sure looks like it,” the demon answered.“Liberty of the English subject and all that.Not to mention the planting of the true church.Just a little blood to water the roots.”

Aziraphale wrung his hands.“It just seems so…unnecessary.He’s not a _bad_ man.”

“What, so not your lot’s idea this time?”

“Of course not!”Aziraphale’s eyes narrowed.“Yours?”

Crowley gave his usual twisting shrug.“No, can’t really take credit for this one.I mean, eight years of on-and-off civil war, it’s been easy pickings, but this in particular…no.”

“It’s too horrible.”

“You’ve seen worse, Aziraphale.”Golgotha had been a nasty piece of work, after all.

“It’s _always_ horrible, Crowley, but I keep thinking they’re getting better, and they’re not.When the chips are down, they’re…simply not.That makes it worse every time.”

The crowd stirred suddenly with excitement, forcing Aziraphale and Crowley closer together. A man in a black cloak had appeared, followed by a bishop and guards, walking slowly to join the others on the scaffolding.Unlike everyone else on the scaffolding, the man in black wore his hair past his shoulders.He turned to address the crowd.

“He’s wearing two shirts,” Crowley muttered.“So his voice won’t shake.Poor bastard.”

But they were too far away.“Can you even hear him?” Aziraphale said, standing on tiptoe, and perhaps rising up just a little more than ought to have been possible even like that.

“No.If it bothers you so much, why don’t you miracle him out of there?”

“No clear instructions.”

“And, what, you don’t dare act on your own?If the righteous action is so obvious even to humans, why should _you_ need to be told what to do?”

Aziraphale shot him a quick, frustrated look before returning to craning over the crowd.“You _know_ it could be the Plan.”

Crowley rolled his eyes and mouthed exaggeratedly, “the Plan,” but turned to watch himself.The man shed the cloak, tucked his hair into a white satin night-cap, and laid down on the platform, resting his head on a block.An ominous silence fell over the crowd.“He’s praying, angel,” he whispered.“Can you hear him now?”

“ _Do_ be quiet, please,” Aziraphale said, growing red.

The man raised his hand.

An instant later, the axe fell.The crowd gasped—in horror, in delight, in excitement.Many in the crowd—and more than one on the platform—stared around, anticipating some divine consequence.Crowley swallowed.A close observer might have seen his tongue then flick out in a way not at all human.

The cut was a good workmanlike one; the head had fallen neatly to the platform.The executioner bent for it. 

He lifted what was left of Charles I, last king of England, aloft.His eyes were closed and his jaw slack.Blood dripped steadily from the stump of his neck.“Behold the head of a traitor,” he intoned. 

Then he dropped it into the crowd of soldiers below, who swarmed around it, dipping their handkerchiefs in the blood.

The world swam before Aziraphale’s eyes as he lapsed back onto the ground, nearly falling backwards.Crowley, whose attention had supposedly been fixed on the drama before him, noticed at once.He slipped his hand under Aziraphale’s elbow.

“All right, angel,” he sighed.“This is no place for the likes of you.Let’s get you out of here.”

Crowley had rooms not too far away, overlooking a yard in which chickens squawked.The servant had been in recently to build the fire, leaving the hall pleasantly warm after the brisk air outdoors.He settled Aziraphale on a low bench covered with cushions and went to find the jug of ale.Aziraphale propped his head and shut his eyes.

“It’s just been so _dreary_ ,” he sighed as Crowley returned with a cup.

“I know,” Crowley agreed.“London’s no fun anymore.No wrestling, no bowls, not even a good bear-baiting.“

Aziraphale frowned.“ _I_ was thinking more of all the lovely stained glass broken, and pulling down Cheapside Cross, and the music for services all stopped.The music.It was _such_ a good century or so, you know.”

“And Christmas gone,” Crowley muttered.“Always winter and never Christmas.Here.My landlady’s best.”

Aziraphale accepted the silver drinking-cup, whose handle was in the form of a snake, and took a draught of the mild sour small-ale, then set it down on the floor and subsided back against the cushions.“Do you think it will bring peace, at least?” he ventured, half-hopeful.

“I doubt it,” Crowley said, realistically.

Aziraphale’s face fell.“So many thousands of years of this kind of thing.Sometimes it just all seems so pointless and ugly.”

Crowley looked at him, stretched out and miserable in his full mildness. Ridiculous, a crueler mind might have thought.A proper demon would, at this point, have sought to sow doubts and wreak havoc in the mind of such an angel.No angel had been suborned since the Fall proper, but that didn’t mean demons had ever stopped trying.

Instead, he said, dropping into the one large upholstered chair, “Come on, it’s not that bad.They’re still writing, at least.I’ve got one--oh, he’s going to be something if he doesn’t lose his sight.And what about that one last year, that one was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?”

“‘Some have dispatcht their Cakes and Creame, Before that we have left to dreame, And some have wept, and woo'd, and plighted Troth, And chose their Priest, ere we can cast off sloth,’” murmured Aziraphale. 

“Yeah, I liked that one.Proper May Day spirit, if there still was May Day.‘Come, let us goe, while we are in our prime; And take the harmlesse follie of the time.’”He paused.“Everything passes away for them, good _and_ bad, you know.”

“But not for us.”

“No,” Crowley conceded.“No, angel, not for us.”

The fire crackled.They sat in companionable silence for a little while.Crowley watched Aziraphale’s eyes drift closed.Probably up all night fretting, he thought. Worrying over how some absurd little creature might suffer, when he hadn’t flinched at the drowning of the whole world.What a way to spend eternity.

He threw a heavy woolen blanket over the sleeping form and posted himself at the window, wondering what the morning would bring.A world without a king.What an idea.What an opportunity.

**Author's Note:**

> Optional pedantry:
> 
> Charles I was executed in London on January 30, 1649, after two civil wars and a show trial staged by a Parliament purged by force of royalist sympathizers shortly beforehand. There was to be no king again in England until the country revolted against the installation of Oliver Cromwell's son as Lord Protector after his death, leading to the restoration of the Stuarts in the person of Charles II (Charles's son). There never was, in fact, another proper civil war in the country.
> 
> Robert Herrick published _Hesperides_ , including [Corinna's going a-maying](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47284/corinnas-going-a-maying), in 1648. Crowley's protege was to first publish a rather more famous work in 1667.


End file.
